Home-grown talent is a funny old thing. We glug down Stella Artois while scoffing vindaloo and sporting Armani loafers (no socks) and claim to be as breast-beatingly British as possible.

And yet the constant kvetch trickling up and down the country is the fact that the players coming through aren’t English. The reality of the matter is that we should be proud to have players like this in our league and Cesc Fabregas and Adel Taarabt are just as home-grown as their English colleagues.

They have chosen to come through the English system. But that's not the way Terry Tabloid sees it, as he looks at the game with his beady blinkered eyes. He sees 'foreigners' coming in and ruining our perfectly-laid youth systems, laying root in our British soil and muscling out all those fledgling Wayne Rooney's littered around the domestic game.

'Are we really saying that the only way for the Premier League to succeed is to give players preference not on merit, but on nationality?'


There is a huge Catch 22 for managers; blood a player too early and you risk giving him that legendary scourge of youth - ’burnout’ (which is a completely false notion in my opinion but that is another matter).

Don't give a player enough of a chance and he is being starved of first-team Football; being throttled of his birthright by Johnny Foreigner who plays in his position and keeps him out of the team.

Are we really saying that the only way for the Premier League to succeed is to give players preference not on merit, but on nationality?

And what if the managers turned round and said: "OK, you were right all along, I am going to send all my 'foreigners' back from whence they came." How do we see Theo Walcott et al doing? Well probably pretty well initially, as this hypothetical Terry Tabloid Premier League wouldn't have any foreigners in it. And it would be only during international games that we'd get a nasty surprise when we would get routed by a foreign team.
 
There are countless unique things that set our nation apart from everyone else, but it is our footballing jingoism that has slipped into the wrinkles of the visage of the English Sport like nowhere else.

Freddie Sears dived in the Everton game? Must be because the foreigners taught him. Walcott isn't progressing as expected? Must be because the foreigners stop him from getting in the team.

England don't qualify for Euro 2008? The England team is in crisis because our little Englanders cannot get a look in thanks to Johnny Foreigner - who spends most of his first-team outings playing time flouncing around and Diving.

And yet the implication remains that youngsters like Fabregas and Taarabt aren't a couple of foreign leeches, rather they are two players who have elected to spend the formative part of their careers in England.

We should be proud of this just like when we glug Belgian beer, Indian curry, and wear Italian loafers.